It was Sparrow, face clouded, who turned to Minya and asked, uncertain, “What did you mean by ‘see to her’?”
“Oh,” said Minya, screwing up her face as though the subject were regrettable. “As you were so kind to point out to me before, Sarai’s dead.” She fluttered her fingers toward the body. “We can’t just leave that lying there, can we? We’re going to have to burn it.”
Chapter 5
The Sting and the Ache
Burn it.
It shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it did. The soil in the garden was too shallow for burial, and of course Minya was right: You couldn’t just leave a body lying around. But they were none of them ready to face what must be done. It was all too raw, the body too real and too… Sarai.
“No,” said Lazlo, stricken pale. He still couldn’t reconcile the two of her. “We…we have her body and we have her soul. Can’t we just…put them back together?”
Minya raised her eyebrows. “Put them back together?” she parroted, her tone mocking. “What, like pouring an egg back into its shell?”
Great Ellen placed a quelling hand on her shoulder and told Lazlo, with utmost gentleness, “It doesn’t work like that, I’m afraid.”
Sarai knew her body was beyond repair. Her hearts had been pierced, her spine shattered, but still she wished for this same miracle. “Weren’t there godspawn who could heal?” she asked, thinking of all the other magical children born in the citadel and vanished from it over the years.
“Indeed there were,” said the nurse. “But they’d do us no good. Death can’t be healed.”
“One who could bring back the dead, then,” she persisted. “Weren’t there any?”
“If there were, they’re no help to us now, bless them wherever they may be. There’s no saving your body, love. I’m sorry for it, but Minya’s right.”
“But to burn it,” said Ruby in soft panic, for it was she who would have to light the fire. “It’s so…permanent.”
“Death is permanent,” said Less Ellen, “while flesh very much is not.” She was less a force of nature than Great Ellen, but she was a steady presence with her calming hands and sweet voice. When they were small she had sung them lullabies from Weep. Now she said, “It’s best done soon. Nothing to be gained by waiting.”
The Ellens should know. They had tended their own murdered bodies once upon a time, and burned them in a pyre along with all the gods and babies who’d died that same dark day.
Sparrow knelt beside the corpse. The movement was sudden, as though her knees gave out. A compulsion forced her to put her hands on the body. Her gift was what it was. She made things grow. She was Orchid Witch, not a healer, but she could sense the pulse of life in plants even at its faintest, and had coaxed forth blooms from withered stalks that to anyone else would seem dead. If there was life yet in Sarai, she thought she would at least know. Hesitating, she reached out, her hands trembling as they came to rest on the bloodied blue skin. She closed her eyes and listened, or did something like listen. It was no ordinary sense, and was akin to the way Minya felt for the passage of spirits in the air.
But Minya had sensed the flutter of Sarai’s spirit and hooked it. Sparrow felt only a terrible echoing nothing.
She drew back her hands. They were shaking. She had never touched a dead body, and hoped she never would again. It was so inert, so… vacant. She wept for all that it would never do or feel, her tears following the dried salt paths left by many others since last night.
Watching her, the rest of them understood that this was final. Lazlo felt a sting behind his eyes and an ache in his hearts, and so did Sarai, even though she understood that her eyes, her hearts, weren’t real, and so neither were the sting and the ache.
Ruby sobbed, turning to Feral to crush her face to his chest. He spread one big hand over the back of her head, his fingers disappearing in her wild dark hair, and bent over her to hide his face while his shoulders shook in silence.
The Ellens wept, too. Only Minya’s eyes were dry.
Lazlo alone caught the moment that she glanced down at the body in the flowers and looked, for an instant, like an actual child. Her eyes weren’t beetle shells then, and they weren’t ablaze with triumph. They were…lost, as though she hardly knew what she was seeing. And then she felt him watching and it was over. Her gaze slashed to meet his and there was nothing in it but challenge.
“Clean this up,” she told them, with a wave of her hand dismissing the corpse as naught but a mess in need of tidying. “Say good-bye. Do what you need to do. We’ll discuss Weep once you’ve finished.” She turned away. It was clear she intended to stalk off without another word, but was thwarted by the arcade, which Lazlo had earlier closed to trap her army. “You,” she commanded without looking back. “Open the doors.”
Lazlo did. As he had melted them closed, so did he melt them back open. It was the first time he’d done it in a state of calm, all else having happened in a blur of desperation, and he marveled at the ease of it. The mesarthium responded to his merest urging, and a small thrill ran through him.
I have power, he thought, amazed.
When the archways had been restored, he saw the ghost army waiting within, and worried that Minya would renew her attack, but she didn’t. She just walked away.
He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate. As he watched her go, so small and all alone, a moment of clarity shattered him. She might be savage, beyond redemption, broken beyond repair. But if they wanted to save Sarai and Weep…they had to save her first.
Chapter 6
Every One Cried “Monster”
Minya pushed through the clot of her ghosts. She could have moved them aside to clear a path for herself, but it suited her just now to shove. “Back to your posts,” she commanded, harsh, and they immediately moved off to take up their prior positions throughout the citadel.
She needn’t have spoken aloud. It wasn’t her words the ghosts were obeying. Her will smothered theirs. She moved them like game pieces. But it was good to speak and be obeyed. It flitted through her mind how simple it would be if everyone were dead and hers to command.
From the gallery it was only a few turns and a short passage to reach the door she sought. It wasn’t properly a door, not anymore, having frozen in the act of closing at the moment of Skathis’s death. It was tall—twice the height of a man—and though it must have been wide once, it was now a mere gap. She could only just squeeze through. She had to work her head from side to side. It would be easier, she thought, without ears. Everything would be. Then she wouldn’t have to hear the breathless, righteous weakness of the others, their begging talk of mercy, their dissent.
Once her head was in, she wedged a shoulder into the gap. The rest should have slipped right through, but her chest was too puffed up with furious breathing. She had to forcibly exhale and thrust herself in. It hurt—especially where Rasalas’s hoof had pinned her—but it was nothing under the steady seethe of her rage.
Inside, there was an antechamber, and then the walls opened up into the space that had become her sanctuary: the heart of the citadel, they had dubbed it as children.